Restaurant / Bar Reviews (33)

Hops at 84 East is located at 84 East 8th Street in downtown Holland. The former 84 East and Froggy’s restaurants have been combined and renovated with a new bar featuring 70 taps of craft beer, cider, and wine and the kitchen enhanced to include old menu favorites as well as new 600 degree brick pizza ovens. Rotating taps for the grand opening weekend included KBS, Devil Dancer, and Backwoods Bastard from Founders, and Q Falls, Oracle, and Wedding Ale from Bell’s. A special “hop-rocket” wet hopped craft beer was also tapped each day for the celebration. Live music was featured all weekend long with Further Closer on Friday, De Hurricane Reggae Band on Saturday, and Matt Plessner on Sunday.

In 1990, downtown Holland was quite different than the sprawling success it is today. Many buildings lacked tenants and were in need of renovation, and some business owners took it upon themselves to help reinvigorate the area.

In 2000, Tim and Sue Bies eyed a brick-and-sandstone building at Oak and Sixth Streets in Calumet with dreams of opening the Michigan House Café and Brew Pub – a combination of the building’s roots as a restaurant and brewery in the western Upper Peninsula.

With even Starbucks across the nation now getting in on beer and wine, the coffee house and pub concept has been gaining in popularity. EB Coffee and Pub in Caledonia is one step ahead of the game, launching Michigan’s first ever brewery as part of the Essential Bean Coffee House. I made my first visit on a Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after the opening, and the beer was very popular with the weekend crowd.

Pairing a tropical theme along with Michigan and other craft beer selections, Mango’s Bar & Grille has remained a staple of Muskegon’s Lakeside now for many years. The restaurant has recently doubled their draft selection from 6 taps to 12 taps with an emphasis local and Michigan beers. The expanded selection has allowed Mango’s to be one of the first restaurants in the area to include both of Muskegon’s new breweries Unruly & Pigeon Hill on tap at the same time. Other Michigan favorites such as Perrin, Odd Side Ales, Founders and Bell’s are currently prominently featured as well as non-Michigan craft breweries such as New Belgium.

The Buck is the Southwest Michigan’s holy grail of beer bars! The Buck is located in the quaint downtown of St. Joseph, MI just across the street from Lake Michigan. The Buck features 74 tap handles featuring only the best in Local Michigan craft breweries with only 7 are not being local drafts. It also gets many specialty or limited beers not found at many other establishments due to how much volume they sell. The Buck sells the most Greenbush draft beer aside from the breweries own tasting room.

It isn’t often that I look at something and think, “Man! I wish I had thought of that!” The Lite Brite game was one time (although it came out before I was born) and so was the Twilight series (the books are abysmal but somehow that broad got an agent, a publisher and made a zillion dollars). More recently, and in my own little town, I looked at the wonder that is Bill’s Beer Garden and thought, “Wow! I really really wish I’d thought of this!” Because seriously, doesn’t everyone like to sit outside and drink Michigan beer?

Clubhouse BFD in Rochester Hills is a truly a mighty bastion of craft beer. The “BFD” stands for “beer, food, drink”, and while that might seem a little redundant, the beer part of the acronym rightly does deserve its own recognition at the Clubhouse. The business is owned by Scott LePage, whose father you may know as the owner of Big Rock Chop House and the forthcoming Griffin Claw Brewing Company in Birmingham, so there’s definitely a pedigree of success and beer knowledge in play here.

Veteran Restaurateur Hoby Thrasher promised something new for Muskegon with the new Hank’s Tavern, and on Saturday, December 1st he has delivered. The Henry / Sherman St. location is not new; Previous businesses at this location have included a bank and fast food pizza joint with the short-lived Bonfire restaurant being the most recent tenant. However, this time around Hoby has really outdone himself transforming the building which once felt small and cramped to an expansive and vibrant atmosphere which will be sure to impress anyone familiar with the building’s former occupants.